That comes through loud and clear in the eponymous debut
album of the Lighthouse Trio, on which the 43-year-old Petah Tikva-born drummer
joined forces with British pair pianist Gwilym Simcock and
saxophonist-clarinetist Tim Garland, and which came out on the German-based ACT
record label last year.

Betwixt the straight-ahead jazz stuff and the more
left field exploratory jazz-oriented forays there are clear cut signs and sounds
from the Middle East.

I hooked up with Sirkis, and the other members of
the trio, a few months ago, at the 2012 Jazz-ahead international jazz expo in
Bremen, Germany, where they put on one of the best-received shows of the
three-day event.

Sirkis has lived in the UK for the past 13 years but,
when he left Ben-Gurion Airport, he wasn’t thinking about working in the land of
fish and chips.

“I went to Holland in 1998, to play with an Israeli
guitarist called Amir Perlman,” he recalls. “We had a good time and life was
very laid back in Amsterdam.”

But a trip across the North Sea changed all
that. “I went to London, just for a week for a visit, and I found a jazz scene
there that was really buzzing.”

In fact, it was almost more than Sirkis
could handle.

“I sat in with bands, and I even had offers of gigs that I
couldn’t fit in to my schedule. Things were really happening in Britain, and
there were many great bands and musicians, so I thought I’d try my luck there.”
The following year Sirkis relocated to London.

By all accounts, the
drummer has done well for himself since he took up residence in Britain. He
quickly landed gigs with jazz musicians from right across the British jazz
spectrum, such as Irish-born vocalist Christine Tobin, and jazz and rock
drummer, pianist and band leader Gary Husband, but he also started leading his
own projects as well as musically maintaining a link with his country of
birth.

During Sirkis’s first year in London he enjoyed a fruitful
collaboration with Palestinian oud player and composer Adel Salameh, and
established The Inner Noise trio together with Jersey-born keyboardist Steve
Lodder and guitarist Mike Outram. The band eventually released three acclaimed
albums.

The drummer also joined forces with renowned Israeli-born
saxophonist Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensemble whose Exile release won Best CD
of the Year at the 2003 BBC Jazz Awards.

Sirkis has also led from the
front with the Asaf Sirkis Trio of bassist Yaron Stavi and guitarist Tassos
Spiliotopoulos, putting out the highly polished Letting Go album in
2010.

The now 31-year-old Simcock and Sirkis have known each other for
some time, although the Israeli says it took a while for them to hook up
musically. “In 2001, I was at the 606 Club in Chelsea [London] for a gig with
[British guitarist] Phil Robson and Gwilym sat in. I wondered who this really
shy kid was, and then he started playing and I thought: ‘He’s OK.’” Still there
was a phonetic minefield to be negotiated before the two could really start
creating. “It took me four more years to learn how to pronounce his name,” jokes
Sirkis, “and when I managed to spell his name correctly we started to play music
together.”

Most people would not naturally associate London with the kind
of high energy jazz vibes that Sirkis describes, and certainly not on the level
of New York, or even Paris or places in Germany. While the drummer says he was
favorably impressed with the state of affairs in London when he arrived, he says
that things have moved along appreciably in the interim. “The jazz scene in
London, and in Britain as a whole, has massively changed,” he says, although
noting he didn’t exactly have to go around cap in hand in 1999 either. “I found
people to play with right from the beginning, which was really great because I
didn’t have a penny. And especially in the last six to eight years, the level of
young British jazz musicians has just been booming. It’s
unbelievable.”

The Lighthouse mob have been together for seven years now
and Simcock says the drummer brings significantly added value to their joint
efforts. “Both Tim and I have learned so much from Asaf’s rhythmic approach, and
from the fact that he has done so much studying of different rhythmic approaches
from all over the world. There is so much rhythm in this trio, and such a strong
rhythmic basis, that of course Asaf is the propulsion for all that.”

On
the opening track of Lighthouse, Space Junk, Sirkis starts off behind the drum
set before darting into a darbouka slot which takes the beat to another
level.

Garland, an accomplished composer, is certainly appreciative of
the cultural spread in the band.

“This cross-fertilization of cultures is
the very food of which many of us feed. The whole history of jazz is bound up
with it. It’s all about synthesis and that way you never stop growing. I think
most of the more interesting jazz composers take a lot of their influences from
what would be considered outside of jazz.”

According to Garland, almost
anything goes. “If you think of jazz more as an approach, rather than a set
genre, then all the arguments about whether this or that is jazz go out of the
window.”

Sirkis certainly feels comfortable with that mindset and one
hopes, before too long, we’ll get a chance to hear him and his Lighthouse pals
in this part of the world.

Sites Of Interest

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